Also attached is a rap by one of my other hermanos—we put it on a click track that should line up with whatever you decide to do.
The crew sends love and listen: When the fuck are you bringing your ass down here? Everything is in place for a grand production. Say the word and I roll it out.
Un abrazo bien fuerte, ’mano.
KACIQUE
I already know what this track is, and what’s going to happen—is already happening—as he prepares to play it. My dress shoes clacking on the linoleum kitchen tiles, my little hands in Isabel’s, both of us looking kind of irritated because Nilda is telling us what to do. But in a tiny, secret chamber of my heart, I’m thrilled because this means Nilda is about to play piano.
“Adina!” Ramón bellows so suddenly it makes me lurch backward from his shoulders and send a tiny, breeze-like adjustment rippling through the air. Ramón raises one eyebrow and looks around the room.
“Whatsup?” Adina appears, brushing her teeth and wearing some stylish black silk pajamas.
“What’s this mean?”
Adina leans over and frowns at the screen. “Chavo is Mexican for kid, I think. Kacique has Mexican friends?”
“I guess?”
“So: Not one penny, kid, like the turkeys say?”
“I know that, thank you. I’m saying, what does it mean mean?”
“Oh.” Adina straightens, brushes, thinks. “I dunno. Just an expression, I guess. He sent you a María Teresa Vera track? My mom used to … listen to her.” Adina’s spontaneity and ease with the world disappear whenever she mentions her family. You can barely make out the last few words of what she says.
“Oh? I’d never heard of her.”
“Yeah.” She’s standing, wrapping her arms around herself even though the heater is cranking away. “Old-timey guitar-playing songstress. You gonna make a track from it?”
“That’s what Comandante Kacique has requested, so yeah. Why not? You wanna hear it?”
“Sure,” Adina says, but it sounds more like a whispered moan.
Ramón frowns and clicks his mouse and the room is suddenly full with that scratchy, white hum of a very long time ago. The guitar sounds like it’s playing from underwater; a tumbling construction of shaken notes resolves into a suave, confident vamp.
“Wow,” Ramón says. Inside him, the crooked nostalgia churns, the one that took over his mind in Enrique’s mansion. Each scratchy note brings with it an image of that imagined island: the corny palm trees and plazas, sure, but there is something deeper there too—the sense of loss, the impossible reach toward a family before it was shattered. Ramón has never seen Cuba, but he longs for it.
Adina just nods, eyes closed.
And we begin again: My dress shoes clack on the linoleum kitchen tiles and Isabel’s hands squeeze mine as Nilda’s notes ring out from the old piano. Her fingers stretch expertly across the keys, and she makes that opening riff feel dramatic, majestic; it’s what falling in love must feel like, and then, my favorite part: Her left hand joins in, and the bass tumbles along beneath the melody. I imagine a manly lover sweeping into the room with wiggling eyebrows, sliding through the sly sensuality of those tinkling high notes with his thick vibrato strut, and the two voices gallivanting through the air above us, dipping and diving and pulsing.
My sister is a whole orchestra! I can’t even concentrate on the steps, Nilda’s music is so enthralling.
Here in New Jersey, the voices sweep in: a woman’s louder, firm and impassioned but somehow vulnerable, demanding. The man’s a softer undercurrent beneath it, barely there. ¿Qué te importa que te ame? and the guitars dance along in mocking echoes.
“You okay?”
Adina shakes her head.
“You wanna talk about it?”
Another shake.
“Should I turn it off?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
Si las cosas, the duo croons, and silently, I croon too, que uno quiere, se pudieran alcanzar, and it’s perfect, the feeling like the words and the music were created in total unison with each other and meant to be sung just like that, in this very moment. If the things we wanted / could be reached … tú me quisieras lo mismo / que veinte años atrás. I remember this version of the song too; there was an era when it was done a thousand times over by every conjunto in the club or fool with a guitar on the Malecón. You would still love me / as you did twenty years ago. Smoothly tragic, like all great boleros: a total emotional train wreck, perfectly harmonized and squeezed into a three-and-a-half-minute ditty.
But none of that compares to Nilda’s fingers stretching across the piano as Isabel and I try pathetically to keep up on the linoleum kitchen tiles.
“It’s a habanera!” Nilda yells, bringing the song to an abrupt crashing halt. “Not a waltz! You have to do it with passion!”
I giggle and Isabel rolls her eyes and then Nilda inserts herself between us, sweeping me up in a ridiculous dance as I squeal, and then dipping me so my head hovers just above the tiles. “Like this!” she says. “Passion!”
“I’m going to go to bed,” Adina whispers when the song winds to a close.
Ramón stands, not sure what to do with his body. “Okay. Good night.”
And she’s gone.
Ramón shakes his head, irritated at what a giant awkward mess he can be in the face of his friend’s sorrow and the whole ridiculous mess that this night has been and everything else. He plugs a spectacular pair of giant studio-style headphones into his computer, puts them on, and clicks the song back to life.
On his back, the room dark, New Jersey sleeping and frozen outside the window, Ramón allows the song to stretch out in his mind. The notes expand and coalesce around the pulse, the voice, guitars, ambient hums lose all meaning and become interwoven strands of sound. Our dress shoes against the linoleum kitchen tiles. Es un pedazo del alma … It’s just a piece of the soul … A beat could drop, a drone, a clack … Que se arranca sin piedad … torn away without pity. A pause, a shimmying rattle breaks the silence, cueing the sudden relapse of sound … es un pedazo del alma … que se arranca sin piedad.
CHAPTER TEN
Padre Sebastián, carrying a prayer book and, of course, a yo-yo.
He flips it down, not even bothering to look, and it hovers there, some magic thing, antigravitational because his wrist has willed it so, and then it zips back up, disappears into his palm. He has such a young face. Well, he is young, I suppose. All of us loved him from the second we saw him. Only kind of in that carnal way that’s supposed to be so wrong. I mean, yes, definitely that way, in so much as our young hearts could manage, but also in some other way. We loved that smile, slightly mischievous and knowing, a touch of self-effacement and so much ease in his stride. We wanted to make it ours somehow, not even knowing what that meant, we wanted the smile to shine for us and us alone. He’d catch us snickering about something during catechism and instead of telling on us or glaring like Padre Eugenio, Padre Sebastián’d just make a mean face so we know he’d seen us and roll his smiling eyes, and it worked because we’d stop talking and pretend to pay attention.
My first orgasm ever was dedicated to Padre Sebastián. I mean, he never knew, of course, but when I got home after receiving Communion one morning, and disappeared into my room while Mami was preparing lunch and Papi chatting with the neighbors and Isabel and Nilda playing rayuela out front, our room belonged to me and my body belonged to me. And I thought about it belonging to him, him putting that wafer on my tongue and me taking his finger in my mouth and then rising up like an angel over him and the whole congregation disappearing around us in our passion and his hands all over me and my hands all over me and Christ watching from his cross above us, smiling slightly in that Mona Lisa way and then explosions, explosions all around me, rising up inside me and I’m done, wake up still in my church dress flat on my back on Nilda’s bed smiling and sweaty and flushed and Mami calling me for lunch.
If he ever knew any of us h
ungered for him so, he never let on, never flirted back, never even remotely made it seem like we would have a chance. When Isabel started spending more time with him as the revolution swept around us, I had a brief fury thinking he’d finally caved and it was my sister of all people who had coerced him out of his vows and not me.
But no. That’s not what this is about. It never was. Isabel has been gone almost a year now. I don’t even know if she’s alive and my house has settled into a steady, tragic clockwork of daily life, which I guess is better than the constant crying and hand-wringing of the first three months. She’s gone. She’s not coming back.
But now I’m sitting in Padre Sebastián’s broom-closet office and he’s yo-yoing and his brow is furrowed like he’s trying to pick what words to say. Padre Sebastián loves words, and his love of words is like a tornado—it swirls around him and widens and then catches you up in it and soon you love words too and you’re not even sure why. At least, that’s what happens to me. Padre Sebastián treats language like a lover; he caresses it and wonders about it, turns it over and over in his mind, lets it change his whole world as he explores it deeper. I didn’t give a damn about learning English or Latin until Padre Sebastián started comparing them to Spanish and showing how much could be gleaned from bouncing one language off another.
All of which is to say: The father is rarely at a loss for words, and when he is, people pay attention. At least, I do.
* * *
There’s Christmas decorations everywhere; the fake snow is like a joke in the burning tropical sun, but everyone’s sense of humor was sucked into the vacuum of civil war, constant explosions, plots, rumors, executions, disappearances. We are a tired people, and, somehow, excited. “We’ve never been here before,” Isabel whispered before she disappeared. “This is something brand-new. Something the whole world will feel.” And little that I knew, I knew she was right, that every word she spoke was true, and something gigantic was in the works, that a regime would fall, and if it did it would be a long time before the dust would settle. Every day, the newspaper would lie about how the government was winning battle after battle, and every day the radio station the rebels had pirated would say the opposite: Victory at La Plata. A breathtaking escape in the Battle of Las Mercedes. And it wasn’t just that we wished it was true, these daring revolutionary escapades—it was that we felt them to be true, felt them in our breath and our bones. The whispers around town spoke of an imminent counteroffensive by the rebels, that any day now they’d sweep down from the Sierra Maestra with all the weapons they’d captured from government troops and flush across the countryside. And now the whole country feels like that moment of chaos before a song resolves back to its one chord, and Isabel’s part of that dissonance, a tiny reminder that we’ve never known harmony, it’s just now we’ve reached fever pitch and everyone craves that tipping point, after centuries of Spanish rule and then yanqui rule by proxy and never freedom, just the veneer of it, but it still hasn’t happened and now we’re all wondering if it ever will. And I was so proud of her, for being part of that change—it made her somehow just as much a giant as the change itself. To me anyway.
And I want in. That’s the truth. I want to see her, and I want in. Because what good is it admiring someone from afar when your country is falling apart and soldiers’ fists are slamming on your front door just for having a sister who disappeared and anyway the whole tide of history is sweeping in with a roar and the distant rumble of explosions in the mountains—what damn good is it?
Why admire when you can be?
I read all the books Isabel left for me a thousand times, but mostly Martí. Martí with his faraway hairline and elegant mustache. Martí, who hated empire in all its forms and organized abroad before sailing heroically back to Cuba to fight for freedom, much like some of these bearded men storming through the countryside. The yanquis have their hands as deep in our pockets and our personal business as the Spaniards did, and the echoes of one long-ago brutality resonate all the way to today.
And I can be a part of something. Something bigger than me and my little whims and crushes, my petty fights with Nilda.
Finally, Padre Sebastián puts down the yo-yo, slides a folded piece of paper across his desk at me.
An address is written on it, it’s in Vedado, the middle of the city. He stares at me for so long I think I might shatter. He puts one finger to his head, then points to the paper, points to my head. I look at it again, print each number into my brain, and then nod and Padre Sebastián brings the paper over to one of the white candles and we both watch it turn brown with the sizzly glowing edges before it disintegrates into ash.
* * *
Ramón rises early on this cold January morning, and I wait, recovering slowly from the toll of that dream.
I’ve become so impatient, a casualty of our awkward coexistence. But it’s not without cause. All these games are cute, but with each memory I fade, and even if I manage to recuperate some of that lost strength along the way, it’s the not knowing how many I even have left that wracks me. That I could simply be gone again, for real and for good this time—that’s what surges through me every time Ramón seems to stall out.
Like right now.
He sits on the bed once again, rubbing his eyes and thinking, and all the while the dream I have so carefully crafted slips slowly away beneath the tide of banal thoughts about the day ahead.
The notebook of my life is open beside him, the pen beside it.
The events of the night before circle through him and his head pounds at the memories.
That dream, my life, becomes vague, a ghost like me.
Padre Sebastián is the key to so much, that I know. He is part of this, one of the pillars of who I was, my young life. He did … he did something important. I need him there, his name, his actions, and irregularities, in that book.
Ramón stands and, just as the seething wrath in me is about to boil over, he glances down at the notebook.
Makes a face.
I wait.
He sits. Picks up the pen.
I simmer. Churn.
He breathes. Writes: Padre Sebastián.
Something in me feels like it’s about to break. When it doesn’t, I disperse myself, torn between shame and relief, and let myself cool to the sound of Ramón’s scratching pen.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Aliceana is ignoring him.
Technically, they’re ignoring each other. Which is also technically not any different than what they do every day. Except now you can see the sadness radiating off Aliceana. Well, I can anyway. It’s all over her when she steps out of the doctors’ lounge, passes Ramón without smiling, and disappears into the ER: She’s devastated.
Ramón watches the ebb and flow of body aches, asthma attacks, and minor injuries. None of it touches him. It hasn’t for a while, but even less so right now. At noon, ambulances bring in an old man. They’re pumping on his chest, squeezing oxygen into a tube coming out of his mouth, but he’s quite dead. Been dead a while and surely isn’t thrilled about such an invasive goodbye party to the world of life. He’ll get over it. Ramón steps out of the way as they rush the gurney through the bay doors and into the crash room.
“S’amatta?” Derringer asks.
“Nothing.”
“Man … I’m bored. At least let me live vicariously through your obviously chaotic and at least vaguely interesting life.”
Ramón looks down at Derringer, who seems to always be squinting for no apparent reason, and shakes his head. “Nah, man, I ain’t in the mood.”
“I’m saying, though—”
Ramón’s phone bursts to life, depriving us all of any more of this awesome conversation. “Hello?” he says, flipping it open as he steps out into the cold.
“¿Diga?”
“Um … ¿hola?”
“Yes? Who is this?”
“You called me … wait a minute.” Ramón looks down at the number. North Jersey. “Tío Pepe?”
&n
bsp; “¿Jes?”
“It’s Ramón. I called you earlier.”
“Who?”
“Ramón, el hijo de Nilda.”
“¡Ah! ¡Ramón! ¿Cómo andas, m’ijo?”
“Bien, Tío. ¿Y tú?”
“I’m okay, papi. Everything okay.”
“Listen, Tío, I wanted to ask you some questions about the family and stuff, that alright?”
“¿Okay?”
Ramón looks up at the sky, then closes his eyes. “Was that a yes?”
“¿Sí?”
“Tío Pepe, I’m going to drive up by where you live. A tu casa, Tío, esta tarde. Hoy. Okay? I want to ask you about the family. And about, um, ancestors? I remember you talking about Santería once. Just some questions. That okay?”
“Okay, m’ijo. Como quieras.”
“Okay, Tío.” Ramón shakes his head, clicks the phone back onto his belt. Says a quiet prayer to no one in particular and walks back inside.
* * *
I remember Tío Pepe. He’s technically Ramón’s great-uncle, my mami’s brother, but who’s keeping track? He was a semi-big-deal businessman under Batista, had a chain of grocery stores, a few houses. Everything came crashing down around him after the revolution and he retreated into himself for a few months before showing up one day at a family dinner, all back slaps and corny jokes like he used to be, and the next day he was gone. At first we all thought he’d gone underground, like rebellion was a family trait that polluted all of our blood. I saw the thin veneer of everything’s fine start to crumble in my mom’s trembling hands and Papi’s day-long bouts of silence.
Then a letter showed up from Miami, all smiles and abrazos a la familia and land of liberty bullshit. We celebrated: Tío Pepe wasn’t dead and he wasn’t going to show up one day getting his insides splattered against a wall on our television; he was alive! And in yanquilandia, coño … Papi got out one of his favorite wines, now contraband, and we sat around the table, but there was still an empty chair where Isabel was supposed to be and everyone knew I was sneaking out every night and no one could fathom any reasonable end to this sudden reign of terror we’d plunged into.
The Book of Lost Saints Page 7